Going Wild: On Kathryn Bromwich’s “At the Edge of the Woods” and Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”
Kathryn Bromwich | At the Edge of the Woods | June 2023 | Two Dollar Radio | 180 Pages
Nan Shepherd | The Living Mountain | 1977 | Aberdeen University Press | 95 Pages
I spent this past October as an artist-in-residence on the grounds of a former marble quarry at the foot of Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. Every day in the late afternoon, I would hike up to the quarry lake at the former excavation site, strip off my tick season layers, and dive into the frigid spring water. Cold plunges produce a rare, primordial kind of terror, akin, I imagine, to coming across a bear in the wild or hearing the forest rustle on a windless night. Upon hitting the water, a singular, vociferous plea rattles forth from the lizard brain: Get the fuck out, idiot.
If you can overcome this, though, something delirious and wonderful happens. The panic softens, and then melts, revealing a raw, newfound placidity. The mid-twentieth century Scottish nature writer Nan Shepherd described the sensation perfectly: “This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self. It is not to be borne. One is lost, stricken, annihilated. Then, life pours back.” It’s that resurrection-like feeling—the rushing return of “life” to the body—that kept me hiking back to the quarry lake each day in Vermont.
Nan Shepherd is best known for The Living Mountain, a slim, incandescent memoir first written in the 1940s, but not published until the naturalist wave of the 1970s. Running less than one hundred pages, the book bursts at the seams with sanguine wisdom. While it recounts Shepherd’s lifetime of hiking in and around the Cairngorm mountains, the memoir is best understood as a geo-poetic inquiry into the kinesthetics of wilderness immersion and the nature of human perception. It’s the kind of book that should be mandatorily sewn into the pockets of any bro headed up to clog the Northeast Ridge on Mount Everest.
Consider, for example, the elegance and lucidity with which Shepherd describes what happens when you go on a long hike:
The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses . . . walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent . . . The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.
While we’re at it, we should also leave The Living Mountain wrapped in a towel for any subscriber to Wim Hof, the so-called Dutch Iceman, famous for his eponymous cold exposure-cum-self-help-cum-mini media empire. Hof claims that, through cold plunging, you can “control the body through just the power of the mind.” Great advertisement for his $119 video course, maybe, but difficult to relate to. Achieving any kind of “control” seems unlikely, and rather beside the point when you’re cold plunging. The benefits are better realized by way of submission, not combat. And yet Hof and his contemporaries often use the language of combat. They want you to conquer nature in the name of self-improvement.
Return to Nan Shepherd if you seek relief from this bellicose rash of wellness-maxing outdoorsy influencer culture. Her philosophy of meek and meaningful wilderness immersion is a great resource for anyone who wants to go on a hike but not be such a dick about it.
You might also find solace in At the Edge of the Woods, a startling new novel by Guardian writer Kathryn Bromwich. Bromwich’s debut—which opens with a Shepherd quote in its epigraph—is a crisp, enigmatic read. The novel is a wonder to take in, in large part due to how Bromwich imbues the narrative with a Shepherd-inspired philosophy on the spellbinding influence of nature and the healing properties of humbly submitting yourself to the wild.
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At the Edge of the Woods is set sometime in the early twentieth century. Laura, not yet forty, lives alone in a cabin on the periphery of a small village in northern Italy. Though Italian by birth, she hails from another part of the boot and has spent most of her adult life in France. She spends her days hiking in the forest to the point of exhaustion and her evenings blighting herself with laudanum and writing “pages and pages about what I have lost, about the life I will never have.” She makes pinpoint analyses of the villagers and offers sumptuous descriptions of the mountain and forest near her cabin. But she is also unwilling (or perhaps unable) to bring that same precision to the seeping wound she carries within her. This contradiction within Laura—the chiaroscuro portrait Bromwich paints of her—develops evenly over the first chunk of the novel, a task pulled off with enviable restraint.
Light eventually pours in when a friend of Laura’s from France shows up to the cabin unannounced. This visit prompts a thirty-page flashback, in which we learn of her unhappy marriage to an abusive aristocrat named Julien. Things came to a head when Laura learned that Julien intended to divorce her and marry his then-pregnant mistress. Laura flew the coop, knowing that if she disappeared for long enough, Julien wouldn’t be able to remarry in time to legitimately claim his mistresses’ child. It's a tasty narrative twist—one that is enriched by the revelation that Laura is barren.
Back in the cabin, Laura tells her friend that she will soon return to France. This is a lie. Even with her vengeance against Julien achieved, Laura still identifies something abstract and unfinished about her time in the woods. Ominously, she concludes: “There are things I need to do here . . . I do not yet know their shape, nor what they will ask of me. But in the night I hear the forest calling, and I silently tell it I am on the way.”
Kathryn Bromwich has talked about how her personal experience of illness informs At the Edge of the Woods. She has dealt with a litany of health issues throughout her life, including being born with MRKH Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that impedes the female reproductive system. Prior to this novel, she also wrote about her intense bout of long COVID, which dredged up a lifetime of illness-induced trauma and also barred her from her favorite pastime: hiking (of course). With this background in mind, we can better appreciate the texture of Laura’s woe, as well as the tender abandon with which she approaches the natural world. One can’t help but imagine what this raw yearning owes to Bromwich’s personal trials.
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In the final third of At the Edge of the Woods, Laura wilds herself in earnest. She hikes longer, harder, and deeper into the forest. She restricts her diet to the bare essentials, refuses all domestic comforts, and sleeps outdoors. In other words: she submits, without reservation, to the wilderness.
And then, one day, she emerges on the other side. In the last chapter of the penultimate section of the novel, Laura goes on a particularly onerous hike that concludes with a bewitchingly cold(!) dip in a lake high up the mountain. She awakes the morning after, definitively transformed. She feels a brand new kind of intimacy with the forest and even develops a range of ineffable, quasi-divine powers: she believes to be “possessed of a double vision” and to see the world in multiple layers, the “there and not there.”
It is at this point in the novel that Shepherd starts to press against the surface. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes at length about the visual illusions one can experience on a good hike. She charmingly calls them “misspellings.” “Misspellings” are not just feckless tricks of the eye, though. They’re not even errors at all, really. They’re revelations. They’re portals to a more total appreciation of the immeasurable world. “Such illusions drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right,” she writes. “It is only one of an infinite number.”
I have to admit that I find this pretty relatable. The first time I cold plunged in the quarry lake in Vermont, I lingered afterwards at the edge of the water, watching the not yet leaf-stripped autumnal Red Maples and Paper Birches that belted the quarry lake pulse like embers. Hallucinating like this was briefly and immediately disorienting, to be sure, but the discomfort just as quickly gave way to a clean, crisp lucidity. Nan Shepherd knows the feeling: “To glimpse an unfamiliar [sight], even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again,” she says.
Laura experiences the very same kind of arc. She is unmade by her transformation, but steadied for the better. She finds herself at last at peace with her wounds and resolved to approach the future without concession or shame. “I am done, at last, looking outward for meaning, or knowledge, or acceptance,” she says in the novel’s final chapter. Laura has learned Nan Shepherd’s concluding lesson from The Living Mountain: “For as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate more deeply into my own…I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know being: this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.”
While the mountain may accord Laura grace, the local villagers sure won’t. Their light-hearted curiosity of Laura stiffens into a palpable fear in the novel’s final third. Her employment opportunities dry up. Her local sneaky link (a toned waiter named Vincenzo) hits the eject button. A few kids pelt her house with rocks. The villagers caught onto her transformation, and feel they know what’s happening. In their minds, Laura has become a strega. A witch.
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It’s tempting to read At the Edge of the Woods as a witch origin story. At the very least, Bromwich makes the soil fertile for this interpretation. Consider, for example, Laura’s fixation with one particular feature of the village’s annual festival procession: a nail from the holy cross. The first time she watches the procession, Laura cannot identify this ostensibly obvious symbol. Then, during the following year’s festival, following her woodsy transformation, she mysteriously passes out upon seeing the nail. An allusion to Laura’s emotional resurrection, surely. But maybe evidence of a witch overcome by the power of Christ, too?
At one point in the novel, Laura recalls a memory in which her mother warned her against sleeping with wet hair for fear of waking up with a searing pain in the neck—“Il colpo della strega, the stroke of the witch.” As the only time Laura invokes her childhood, this moment protrudes from the novel, wart-like, for the reader to inspect. What is the wet hair left undried? Is it Laura’s unattended trauma, metastasized into a terrible curse that turns her into a witch? Or maybe it’s not Laura leaving the wet hair to lie. Maybe the “stroke of the witch” is the way the villagers ostracize Laura—or the way men in particular mistreat her—coming back to bite them in the end?
It’s true that Laura has bad luck with men. She draws an unfortunate lot: men in the novel use her as an intoxicant to lull themselves into the false belief that they are, themselves, unique. Her former husband married her as an affront to his aristocratic family. The aforementioned local waiter, Vincenzo, visits her in the night to prove to himself that he isn’t just another boring, insulated villager. Neither man really wants Laura, obviously, and, in time, their shallowness reveals itself. They’re a couple of wannabe radical fuckbois who hit the eject button the moment that the novelty of hooking up with the alt-girl wears off.
What’s interesting about Laura’s transformation vis-à-vis these experiences is that, from a distance, you could mistake the plot for a traditional fairy tale. Consider it: an intelligent, beautiful, dignified woman turns into a witch after being scorned by lovers and shunned by her community.
But of course, this is not how Bromwich tells the story. Laura is “wretched into something abject” upon being betrayed by Vincenzo near the end of the novel. But she does not declare a contemptuous, Elphaba-esque oath to seek revenge and pursue villainy. Her abject state doesn’t feel even remotely wicked. It feels like triumph. It leads her to the bosom of the wild, after all, wherein she finds healing.
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At the Edge of the Woods is at once a feminist revenge fantasy, a fabulist tragedy, and a psychedelic paean to the wonders and blessings of the natural world. It might be best summarized, though, as the story of a barren individual—reproductively, but also metaphysically—regaining the ability to feel. Over the course of the novel, Laura rises from the depths of insouciance into a beautiful surge of feeling and knowing. Just consider the contrast between the way the book begins and ends. “I feel nothing at all,” she says, overlooking the woods at the end of the first chapter. And in the last sentence of the novel, as she again looks out over the wilderness: “I feel everything.” We can also call this arc something of a narrative cold plunge. At the beginning of the novel, first flung into the harsh woods, she was—as Shepherd would say—“disintegrated,” “stricken,” and “annihilated.” In the end, upon arising from the frigid depths of the elements, Laura feels newly rejuvenated.
Is this all kind of cheesy? Yes, absolutely. And so is Shepherd’s reverence for the multitudinal glory of nature, for that matter. But it’s also refreshing, even if the discerning contemporary reader is primed to chafe against sincerity. Earnestness is cringe, and all that. It’s unfashionable to show your protagonist’s growth so clearly. It’s naive to unabashedly exalt the dazzling beauty of the world. These are well-reasoned (and distinctly cool) judgments. All I’m saying is: maybe it's healthy to allow yourself to entertain wonder once in a while.
What helps is that Bromwich and Shepherd manage to be sincere without being cloying. A lot of Transcendentalism and Romanticism, by contrast, feels pretty disingenuous and try-hard. Thoreau with his laundered clothing; Byron in his ridiculous Greek costume. A similar criticism could (and should) be leveled at Wim Hof and his army of teeth-chattering self-optimizers. Bromwich and Shepherd sidestep all this by not striving or summiting. They’re not fighting the freezing water. They’re not standing atop the mountain, proudly surveying the Sea of Fog. Reverence is cringe when coupled with the impulse to strive directly towards that which you revere.
The architecture of At the Edge of the Woods rejects that model. At the novel’s beginning, Laura tries for the top of the pass in her daily hikes where “once or twice, the sight leaves me breathless, as though I might be approaching something meaningful but just out of reach.” Over the course of the novel, though, her approach changes. “Instead of striving always for the summit, I learn to wander without a fixed aim, absorbing the essence of the mountain around me,” she says. Contrast this to the local village men, who compete during the annual festival to see who can climb a tall tree the fastest—a competition that ends in tragedy just before the novel’s climax. Contrast this to Wim Hof’s appeal for man to physically and spiritually dominate nature for personal enhancement.
Beauty, healing, feeling, knowing oneself? These are mystical, mutable things. You can’t summit them. You can’t conquer or fully achieve them. Just meander in their general direction. Like Nan Shepherd says: “The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”